What Governments Can Do When Robots Take Our Jobs

The One Skill Employees Need to Survive the AI Revolution · Fortune

One key fact of economic life is that most people who don't work in capitalist societies don't make any money. Some social and economic policy wonks have argued, then, that as automation improves our productivity we can afford to pay people a living wage, whether they work or not. This idea is popping up across Europe. Several cities in Holland, beginning with Utrecht, will see what happens when people in a community are simply granted a basic income (about $1,000 per month), effectively breaking the bond that has always existed between income and work. Finland is planning a similar program, and the citizens of Switzerland will vote on a more generous guaranteed basic income (about $2500 per month) next month.

The concept is not a new one (it was discussed, for example, as early as the Nixon administration in the US) but it has picked up support from various quarters as new levels of automation fuel expectations that unprecedented productivity will create more than enough wealth to sustain us all, but it will unfortunately land in only a very few bank accounts - that is, unless government steps in with some extraordinary form of redistribution.

The question, of course, is whether the provision of income with no strings attached will create too much disincentive to work for recipients' own good and the good of society. Proponents of unconditional income believe the impulse to create value is innate in humans, and if anything is channeled into less socially valuable activities when the point must be to gain payment for one's work. University of London professor Guy Standing, who coined the term "precariat" to describe a working class increasingly stressed by precarious work arrangements, says that, even more important than a redistribution of wealth, guarantees of basic income would constitute a "redistribution of security."

Opponents of the idea are much more inclined to think humans are naturally lazy, and if given the opportunity to do nothing for their income, will do exactly that. While such critics are legion, we would put, for example, New York Times columnist David Brooks in this camp. Brooks has written that, as part of a job creation agenda, the government should "reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are."

To find out who is right, the Dutch city of Utrecht (in partnership with researchers from the University of Utrecht) has taken the portion of its residents who are already on welfare, and who are currently obliged to fulfill certain requirements to keep receiving it, and divided them into three groups. Some get the income unconditionally, meaning that they are not subject to any rules; indeed, even if they start working at a paying job or otherwise gain income, the monthly disbursements will still be made. The second group is subject to some rules, albeit different ones than the city has today. And the third group, as the experiment's control group, continues receiving benefits according to current law, which requires them to engage in job-hunting and to lack other sources of income.